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YouTube: Not as Social a Place as it Seems

November 3, 2008 — Dave

After doing our research, we discovered an interesting finding about the social side of YouTube. Although a majority of college students use YouTube and have an account, none of our test subjects participate in the community features. We even had the option of using them once or twice, but even still, 100% said they did not use the forums, blogs, contests, and subscriptions. This must mean there’s a problem with how YouTube has designed their community.

One of our ideas was to completely revamp the social community features of YouTube to make them more appealing. A problem with this is a finding we came about, where college students (the majority of the users) just don’t have enough time to spend on the community. If this assumption is true, even with a completely new social community, people still might not use it.

The assumption that people simply use YouTuve to show off videos they’ve already seen shows that users don’t see YouTube as a social website, but rather just an entertainment website. This is what pushed our decision to drop the revamping of the social community.